Where the far right wing hangs out

The Globe and Mail's Guide to Trumpism's Online Universe (or Donald Trump's Social Spheres, as the online version of the article title inexplicably gets re-translated) is an eye-opening introduction to America's  right-wing media landscape and its most important social platforms. Eye-opening not least because I've never even heard of some of them (perhaps not that surprising given that I'm 65, British-Canadian, and my politics swing left to green). 

The big five platforms favoured by Trump and his supporters are:

• Truth Social - launched by Trump in 2022 after he was expelled from Twitter (remember Twitter?), this is where Trump and VP JD Vance make most of their announcements. Its power users include Sean Hannity, Charlie Kirk, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jack Posibiek, and is the regular hang-out for aspiring right-wing politicians and the alt-right media, which then disseminate the posts across the Internet as a whole. There are no guard rails and pretty much anything goes. Monthly users, though, only number 4.68 million, paltry compared to many other platforms.
• X - once called Twitter, until Elon Musk bought it in 2022, rolled back monitoring and moderation, and reinstated myriad accounts that had been suspended due to policy and hate-speech violations, including those of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists. Now, it's the go-to platform for those people and for Musk himself, especially given that it has 425 million monthly users. Democrats have abandoned X in droves, and Republican users are now in a strong majority. Offensive memes and AI deepfakes abound, with few to no boundaries or moderation.
• Kick - a Twitch copy with much looser moderation policies around hate speech, harassment and sexual content (Twitch, if you're not familiar, is a video platform for 20-something video game players). Adin Ross, banned from Twitch for his hateful slurs, is Kick's guru, and gaming is only an excuse for rants by white supremacists, racists and misogynists (including Nick Fuentes, Andrew Rate, Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump himself). Monthly users number a mind-boggling 12.5 million.
• YouTube - by far the most popular platform, with 1.7 billion monthly users, frequented by the left and right alike, but its algorithm has been shown to (intentionally or not) drive viewers from more mainstream content to content promoting radical and violent ideas. It is considered a major vehicle for "red-pilling" (converting people to far-right beliefs). "Manosphere" luminaries like Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys, Logan and Jake Paul and Theo Von are among the most influential right-wing players with YouTube channels.
• Rumble - A Canadian-made YouTube alternative, started in 2013, which has been particularly embraced by far right influencers and others who were kicked off YouTube for violating platform rules, including Russell Brand, Dan Bongino, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Steven Crowder and Donald Trump Jr. Here you can see endless videos on pseudo-science, conspiracy theories, paramilitary groups and general alt-right politics, along with 12.6 million other monthly users (and growing).

There are many others, even less well-known including Gab, Parler, Gettr. None of them have any serious moderation (which is, of course, considered woke, liberal, mollycoddling interference), so anything goes - and indeed, is encouraged - including deepfakes, offensive memes, and outright hatespeech. 

The left has nothing like this network. BlueSky may be the closest thing, but it is merely a more heavily-moderated version of X, to which many on the left have decamped in order to escape the toxicity of current-day X. It is not pro-left as such, merely a platform trying to maintain some objectivity and truth. It does not allow the kind of showmanship and outright lies the pro-right outlets do. With this unfair advantage, it's hardly surprising that the far right is in the ascendance at the moment.